Doom on a picture key chain

Alright, so Doom isn’t actually running on the key chain itself, but rather a BifferBoard: a small 150MHz x86 containing ethernet, serial, and even USB with only one watt of power consumption! The project is to show how easy it is to program the BifferBoard and getting it talking to other hackable items – such as the picture key chain for a display. Doom does appear a bit slow, but [Biff] figures its do to how haphazardly it grabs keyboard input over SSH.

Other than that, nice hack! I hadn’t thought about porting games to the picture frame yet. Though it may have been a better idea to actualli incorporate the code to talk to the display into SDL instead of just the Remood-code.

Please note, this was not my hack, I just submitted it because it looked neat.

To Sprite: It’s not like people give credit to Linus every time they mention Linux so maybe people feel it’s just common knowledge that you hacked the frames and don’t need to mention it? Anyhow, I’m sure if you drop Noshbar an email he’ll change his write-up – I’ve had a few email exchanges with him and he seems like a really nice chap – I’m sure he’d not want to offend.

Bifferos: It’s not the text I’m concerned at, it’s the source he posts that hacks interoperability with remood that misses the credits (and the GPL3-license too, by the way, which got ‘downgraded’ to gplv2.) My first idea was to mail him to notify him about the problem, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a mail-address. I kinda hoped he’d contact me via my post here and we could resolve the problem that way.

Sorry for the license/credits-nitpicking, but after reading about tivo’ization etc, I kinda see things like this as a Big Deal, perhaps too much so.

Bifferos: Ofcourse not; hacking should be encouraged! And in this case, because my code is GPL too, it shouldn’t take more than copypasting a few more lines from the original sources and he should be fine.

Sprite, I am terribly sorry about the credits being torn out, that was by NO means intentional.

The whole thing is in insanely quick and dirty hack, and not really for consumption yet, as I’m quite embarassed by it all (hence, it doesn’t have a direct link from the lame-inosity that is my “front page”).

I’ll gladly fix it up tonight, I am truly sorry about the hassle I’ve caused.

> The whole thing is in insanely quick and
> dirty hack, and not really for consumption
> yet, as I’m quite embarassed by it all

Well, you did post to the Bifferboard group,
which has 136 members :)… I guess I
misinterpreted this to mean it was OK to
post it on, looks like I should have
asked first (sorry). Can’t wait to try this
myself though!

cptfalcon: There’s the LeopardBoard, has a 10/100mbit ethernet port (plus a bunch of other ports), ARM9-based (so not x86), 216MHz I believe. 256MB flash storage, 128MB RAM, SD card slot. $84 by itself if you buy it direct (the $99 quote includes a camera, the board was designed to show image processing, but can be used for general purpose too)

cptfalcon: Why would you want to avoid x86? I can understand you want low power and low cost, which are usually attributed to ARM/MIPS, however this isn’t a problem with many of the x86 compatible SoCs. You get the benefit of not needing to cross-compile, being able to test your applications on an x86 desktop machine (if it’s not x64!) before deploying to an embedded device, ability to (easily) run stuff like Qemu, and to run distributions like Gentoo, Debian and Slackware without compiling them from source. I know this is all changing and distros are slowly adding support for ARM, but having played around with OpenWrt for some time (my only option for running Linux on MIPS embedded devices), I’m now sold on x86 unless really fast IO is needed.

Incidentally, depending on your definition of ‘cheap’, the cheapest ethernet-enabled Linux devices are almost certainly hacked routers (see http://www.openwrt.org, plenty to chose from). Pity they discontinued the Edimax BR-6104K which used to be available for just 15 uk pounds!